Crack.
That was a bullet, and far too close to her ear. She twisted and loosed off the last six rounds in the flat-pan magazine at Horst as he ran toward her with a face like something out of the deep oceans, firing the .45 as he came. Enough sanity remained for him to throw himself flat, but his body jerked as he rolled aside. She’d hit him, though there was no way to tell how seriously. But the surviving sailors would be recovering in instants, though the plume of flame and smoke from the first two trucks gave her cover.
She’d survived on surprise and ruthlessness and the equalizing effects of automatic weapons, but now they’d start shooting, and that much firepower would shred her and Ciara in a few seconds.
She dropped down into the driver’s seat. The engine was running and warm. Luz slapped the spark timing control on the left side of the steering column down and the engine’s purr rose to a roar; her left foot stamped to hold the gear in neutral as she let the handbrake off and held the car in position with her right foot on the brake pedal. Even with the brake on it started to move; she increased engine revs up to near full speed with the throttle lever, let the gear pedal off to engage top gear, slowing the engine with the throttle lever to get a smooth gear change . . . and lifted her foot from the brake.
Guvvies had bounce when you did that. She braced herself as it leapt forward toward the doors like a mule with ears laid back and teeth bare.
Crunch.
Things smashed; Luz gave an ooof! as the steering wheel punched her painfully in breasts and belly. Guvvies were also tough, and they had a sturdy bumper and mountings for a winch in front, rather than the naked radiator of the usual Model T. You could hope . . .
She threw the Guvvie into reverse, which made Horst roll aside just as he was about to reach the rifle he’d dropped; it also made the sailors stop shooting at her for fear of hitting him.
“Keep firing, you pigdogs!” he screamed. “Kill the—”
That involved calling her a name which accused her of a practice she actually found delightfully pleasant, with the right lady.
“You should try it; you’d be less boring in bed!” she shouted, and threw the Guvvie forward again. “Germans are the world’s worst spies—like taking candy from a baby!”
As she went she shot across her own body with the little Browning automatic to keep his head down.
Always help an enemy make mistakes, she thought. Poor Horst, this is . . . well, not more than you deserve, but really it must be quite distressing. A pity, but needs must when the devil drives. I need you as upset as possible and not thinking straight.
Luz hadn’t expected to hit him, but accidents did happen; he was three-quarters of the way to his feet again when his head snapped around and he screamed, clapping his hands to his face. Liquid fire had run across the path to the doorway. She ignored it and slapped the throttle lever down as far as it would go, braced again . . .
Crunch-bang!
Blood filled her mouth with copper and salt and iron; she spat to the side. The auto had had time to reach better than twenty miles an hour, two-thirds of the way to its maximum speed. The chain and bar that secured the doors burst; Luz ducked and yelped involuntarily as the chain whirred through the darkness and plucked the flat German naval cap from her head. An inch lower and it would have ripped off her face . . .
An ordinary Model T would have gone straight into Boston Harbor beside the wharf where the rubber boats had first pulled in, if nothing else because the brakes only affected the rear wheels. The Guvvie’s front axle was a modified back axle from the standard model, and she managed to slow with a squeal of brakes and of wheels on the rough concrete, and wrestle the little auto into an insanely sharp turn to the right. Both wheels on that side came off the pavement, and for an instant she thought the auto would tumble into the water instead. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ciara move, face death-white and blood-red, and clumsily throw herself forward on the seat so that she lay half-out of the auto on that side.
Whether or not that was the final hair’s-worth of weight, the Guvvie crashed back down on all four wheels and sped up the silent southbound street between the streetlights’ yellow pyramids. She shot out a hand to catch Ciara’s jacket and make sure she went back onto the seat, and drew a breath to relax . . .
. . . and a flash of light showed in the rearview mirror; the last two trucks had made it out in her wake, though one of them was in flames. Both followed her, and Horst was ahead in the burning one, firing his Colt-Browning rifle at her with that distinctive tunnnk-a tunnnk-a sound it made. The sailors in the back had tossed the canvas cover free and were beating at the flames with their jackets, whipping them down for a moment before the rushing speed fanned them alive again. Another was standing in the bed, leveling a Lewis gun and loosing off bursts from the hip. So was someone in the second truck, whenever the frantic weaving of the first gave them a shot, and the green streaks of tracer rounds went by on either side and overhead.
Luz would have felt a flash of concern under other circumstances—the .30-06 bullets they were spraying with abandon could penetrate a brick wall and kill at half a mile, and they were approaching densely populated residential neighborhoods, with people and their children sleeping. The knowledge of what waited with cold mechanical patience beneath the harbor’s water killed that impulse.
A policeman in his double-breasted blue jacket and peaked cap gaped at the cavalcade blasting by in a roar of flames and hail of bullets, raising his whistle toward his mouth and dropping his hand toward the pistol at his waist. Both were presumably by reflex; then he let the whistle bounce on its lanyard and ran for the nearest call box.
And more speed to him; the police arriving in force would be very good, right now.
Luz laughed wildly.
“It’s an utterly secret undercover operation, and I’m driving fast through the streets of Boston at two in the morning, pursued by German submarine sailors shooting machine guns!” she shouted. “And—¡Esto es lo más absolutamente delicioso de todo!—the Germans are on fire!”
“Oh, shut up, you madwoman!” Ciara managed to choke out, before being noisily sick on the floor of the backseat.
Luz called up the map of the city in her mind, thankful for a good visual memory and the fact that she always studied the layout of a town before a visit.
“And . . . here!”
She stamped on the brake again and cut right, bouncing onto North Street, then accelerating again. The trucks slowed more, because they were carrying a lot more weight for the same engine, and because their drivers had to find her.
“Now, don’t stop and shoot from a good position where you can aim properly,” she urged. “Forget that a Guvvie can’t outrun a stream of bullets from a Lewis but it can outrun a motor truck. Just come bouncing after me again shooting on the move! Put your trust in la suerte de los pendejos y la intervención divina.”
Instinct overcame the sailors’ scanty infantry training . . . and Horst was probably too caught up with pain and rage; that was why she’d taunted him, to flick his pride on the raw when he was most vulnerable. They did indeed count on the luck of fools and divine intervention.
The rearview mirror showed what she’d wanted to see . . .
If they didn’t just run away!
. . . both motor trucks screeched around the corner and swung wide, but pursued without stopping. The blinking of muzzle flashes continued, tracers arching out toward her and then going by with a zip . . . or sparking off the roadway or arching out into the night, or in one case shooting out a streetlight with a spectacular strobing effect.
“I can feel my reservoir of luck draining,” she muttered.
A bullet went ptank! into the Guvvie’s structure somewhere, and then another one peened off something hard and substantial, probably a spring or part of the frame. Enough bullets, and . . .
Then the water of For
t Point Channel loomed ahead, a darkness spotted with glitter from the lights. An intense relief from a fear she hadn’t consciously felt ran through her, like a winding punch in the belly, when she saw that the swinging structure of the Northern Avenue Bridge was locked in place rather than opened to let watercraft go by.
The girders of the bridge flicked by overhead. She braked at the end of the long arch, suddenly aware that the firing from behind had ceased. A quick glance showed that the Germans had stopped at the beginning of the bridge. They were abandoning the burning motor truck; several of them were rolling on the ground, with their comrades smothering flames with their bundled clothes. Two carried Horst between them from the front seat, his arms over their shoulders and his feet dragging limp.
It occurred to them that driving shooting into downtown Boston wasn’t a very good idea, and that they’re dressed like Bureau labor-camp prisoners, and that the one man who knows their escape route is wounded and now unconscious, Luz thought. Don’t relax, muchacha! This isn’t over yet until the film’s in the right hands!
Once she was sure the Germans were leaving—and leaving the second truck to burn, turning in moments to a pyre blocking the entrance to the bridge with a minor fireworks display as ammunition cooked off—she stopped for a moment. A few motions and she had unlocked the Lewis gun from the pintle mount; then she threw it to the roadway. It was likely to attract too much attention driving through central Boston, and if the police were put on alert and getting jumpy . . .
“Ciara,” she said to the figure huddled on the rear seat. “Look up. Let me see that.”
The younger woman obeyed sluggishly. Luz wiped her face with a handkerchief, then gently turned her head and looked at her pupils. Both were contracting and expanding as she turned them away from the streetlight, but the left noticeably less. The pressure cut had bled freely, scalp wounds always did, but a couple of stitches and some time would handle it.
“How do you feel?” Luz said, gently but firmly.
“Dizzy . . . where are we?”
“Boston.”
“I know that!” Ciara put her hands to her head. “Mary, Mother of God but that hurts.”
“Ciara, you’ve got a concussion. I don’t think it’s a bad one but they’re no joke. Just hold this against the cut on your temple and lie quiet as you can. I’ve got to get us to the Chamber office.”
“Where . . .”
“The Custom House Tower. I’d like to get you a doctor, but this has to come first. Lie still, now, querida. We’re almost there.”
Luz drove on, taking Ciara’s cap and tucking her hair up under it. She would still look odd, but not automatically female; it was amazing how eyes slid over you if you didn’t wear the uniform. With luck, she’d benefit from the same assumption McDuffy had been counting on: that this was an unmarked FBS car and should be left strictly alone. Two or three Boston police cars—ordinary Model T touring models painted dark blue with a shield on the doors—passed her as she drove on, heading fast for the bridge, and presumably the reports of fires and shootings. In the distance she could hear the clang of fire engine bells as well. The silent factories and showrooms of the leather district slid by . . .
Now she was into the part of Boston that was almost European-old, with streets laid out by the cows and sheep of English Puritan settlers three hundred years ago and straightened only slightly as the city grew up around them. Waves of fatigue crept in at the corners of her vision as the juices of mortal peril faded from her blood, leaving head aching and throat dry and stomach twisted with nausea that left a sour taste at the back of her mouth to match the heavy smell of blood and vomitus in the Guvvie.
She flogged herself back to full alertness by an act of will as she pulled up in front of the Custom House building. It stood as it had since the 1840s—this had been the waterfront then—of foursquare granite with huge Doric columns on two sides, in the heart of the financial district. Though there was a homely structure one space away that advertised Carter’s Tested Seeds, and another had two wireless masts.
Originally it had been topped with a dome, but a decade ago the work had already outpaced the available space. The nearly five hundred feet of skyscraper that reared out of it now ignored Boston’s height restrictions since this was federal property. Just before it was completed in January of last year the Chamber had quietly secured one of the top floors, below the clock-tower part and level with the four giant eagles at the corners, looking out over the city from between Ionic columns. The combination of steel-framed grandeur and Classical detail was very modern, and very much to the taste of the new organizations the Party had spawned.
The problem is, she thought, the Chamber station in Boston is new and small and I don’t really know the people here—I think I met the station chief last year, but nobody else. That can be awkward. And I think I’m not operating at my best right now. Also I stink, I’m in a German uniform of sorts, and I’m sopping with harbor water and blood.
She brought the Guvvie to a halt before the main entrance. A doorman clattered down, limping; there was some business here every hour of the day, though this was probably a low ebb. Jobs like this were reserved for veterans who wanted them, often for lightly disabled ones. He slowed and stopped, his narrow eyes going wary and broad shoulders tensing under the gray uniform greatcoat; he was several inches over six feet. That reaction was probably to the smell, and from the scar on his cheek and the hitch to his stride he’d recognize the blood-stink; he had a hooked nose and graying raven hair and skin a darker olive than hers, obviously part Indian.
“Ma’am?” he said warily. “Can I call you help?”
He pronounced can and help as if they were spelled kin and heyp; that variety of twang said southwest, probably Texas or even more likely Oklahoma, with a trace of something else underneath that wasn’t English at all. He might even have been a Rough Rider, since he was the right age and a lot of them had been Sooners.
“Yes,” Luz said crisply.
She carefully held the Thompson gun up by the butt and set it down again; this wasn’t a man you wanted to startle late at night.
“My friend and I need to get to the Universal Exports Inspection offices; they’re on the seventeenth floor. Please call with the name Verloc.”
He recognized a code; and from the expression on his face when he glanced upward, he also knew that Universal Exports Inspection wasn’t actually part of the customs service. Then his face went carefully blank.
“And help me with the young lady,” she said, forcing steadiness to her voice. Screaming for haste wouldn’t help at all.
Ciara was nearly unconscious, but she gave a small whimper as the doorman picked her up as easily as a child, carefully cradling her injured head against his shoulder rather than letting it roll free . . . which confirmed her original opinion of his experience with injuries.
“A doctor?” he asked as he walked carefully up the stairs and into the marble and faux-Roman splendors of the rotunda, frowning down at her.
“We’ll handle that in the office,” Luz said firmly, if reluctantly.
* * *
• • •
There were only three people on duty in the offices with their vast view of Boston, and the floor had the feel of a space mostly unoccupied, a matter of the way footsteps echoed and a smell of varnish and new paint. One of the three was a woman of about thirty, in a drab shirtwaist suit with her dark hair up in a bun, working on some accounts and probably doing it to while away the dull early-morning hours. She gave a shocked cluck and hurried forward to help move Ciara into the second office and onto a couch there.
The other two were men, both implausibly young—no older than Ciara, in natty modern three-piece suits but with their jackets off, showing their shoulder holsters as well as their waistcoats. One of them sprang up, short, slim, and dark, with black eyes and crisply curled black hair cut short. His comp
anion had his tie loosened, but this one’s was snug under his wide stiff white collar.
“Good God, what’s this?” he said, speaking very rapidly but clearly. “Is that blood? What is going on? Who’s that girl?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not my blood,” Luz said, extending a hand. “Senior Field Operative Luz O’Malley, Mr. . . .”
“Hoover, Operative John Hoover. I’m Assistant Station Chief here,” the young man said.
That was making much of his position in a place that probably had about fifteen or sixteen personnel, including the clerks and typists not in the chain of command. They only had anyone here now because regulations said a station had to be manned round-the-clock; she was surprised to see the other man.
“That’s Miss Ciara Whelan. She’s been assisting me.”
His eyes widened a little, first as he realized he was talking to a woman and then as he recognized the name; he’d undoubtedly heard of her, but it would be difficult not to in the small world of the Chamber, even if he’d been recruited recently. What he’d have heard would depend on who he’d been talking to, since she had both allies and enemies.
The grip was a little hesitant, and his nose wrinkled as he leaned back slightly. Luz didn’t altogether blame him—after ten days unwashed on a submarine, harbor filth, and then the sort of blood and matter that spattered around when you were close to multiple bullet impacts, she knew she was ripe and beyond it.
Still, he’s going to have to get over that. The Black Chamber isn’t a job for the fastidious.
His very neatly organized desk had a framed Bachelor of Law diploma from George Washington University dated from this year’s spring class; and his voice sounded as if he was trying very hard and nearly successfully to disguise both a speech impediment and an Upper South accent as East Coast General American, only a little softening on the r sounds and final g.
“What can I . . . what’s going on, Miss . . . Special Operative O’Malley? Ciara Whelan? We’ve got a Ciara Whelan on our arrest list as a Clann na nGael member suspected of treasonous correspondence!”
Black Chamber Page 39
